Pleasure For Pleasure (9 page)

T
he door opened, and Josie slapped her arms back in front of her breasts. They were far too large; she couldn't say how it happened, but in the last year, her breasts had grown enormously. At least you don't gain in your legs, Imogen had told her when they were looking at her reflection without The Corset. That was true. Her ankles and legs were fairly slim, compared to the rest of her. It was her hips and breasts that were vulgarly rounded.

Mayne handed her a gorgeous flowered dressing gown, keeping his eyes on the far wall. She slipped her arms through the sleeves. It was a sensual delight: smooth, sleek
silk in a dark violet color, covered with arabesques and wild curls of Indian leaves. “This is so beautiful,” she said, tying the sash. “Have you traveled to India?”

“Good lord, no.”

“Clothes matter a great deal to you, don't they?”

“Absolutely.” He turned around. “You look better in that robe than you do in a gown that doesn't fit you.”

“My gown does fit me,” she said with dignity. “With the corset.”

He handed her glass of champagne back. “Now. You sit down and I'll give you a lesson in how to walk.”

“So as to make a man slaver,” she prompted, sinking into a chair. It felt wonderful to be out of the corset. She crossed her legs and relished the sensation of being able to curve her back. The champagne slipped down her throat in a now familiar rush of apple bubbles. A queer rush of affection bubbled with it, for this exquisite dandy of a gentleman who was taking such time to show her how to succeed on the marriage market.

“Precisely.” Mayne reached down and grabbed her discarded dress. He gave it a speculative shake.

“What on earth are you doing?” she asked. He was wrenching off his coat. “Why are you undressing?” She might have been naive, but even she could tell that this was no scene of seduction, in which he managed to take off her clothes under a ruse, only to strip himself naked.

“I think I could show you best if I put the dress on,” he said, frowning in an adorable fashion. “Thank goodness, it has short sleeves. I'm afraid my arms are unfashionably burly from working with horses.”

And before she could say anything, he stripped off his shirt as well. He wasn't even looking at her, so Josie just sat, transfixed. He would never be able to put her dress on, any more than she could. He was all smooth, sharp-cut muscle, beautifully defined. She thought men had mats of hair on
their chest; she'd seen hair curling from the shirts of men working in her father's stables. But Mayne was smooth, smooth except for the muscles standing out under his skin.

Now he looked utterly unfamiliar. The sleek, exquisitely groomed Mayne, in the moonlight filtering through those small overhead windows, looked wild, like Bacchus, the god of wine. He would be perfectly at home in a shadowy wood, vines wound in that mop of curls, a sleek mat of hair beginning at his waist.

Without noticing, Josie had frozen in her chair, not making a sound, as if a wild animal stalked her chamber without seeing her. She felt a blend of attraction and fear, of amazement and shock.

A second later the attraction turned to helpless laughter.

Mayne picked up her pink dress and in one swift movement ripped it down the back. Then, before she could utter a protest—one of Madame Badeau's special creations! Made of the finest silk, with an overskirt of rose gauze and trimmed everywhere in tiny white glass beads!—he pulled the sleeves briskly up his arms. She could hear a faint ripping sound, but really, did it matter at this point?

“Now,” he said, stopping to have a swallow of wine. “Here I am.”

“There you are,” she said, laughing helplessly. His muscled arms stuck out of her little pink cap sleeves with all the incongruity of a tiger wearing an apron.

“Pay attention,” he said severely. “As I said, here I am. Miss Lucy Debutante.”

Josie leaped to her feet and dropped into a curtsy. “What a pleasure to meet you, Miss Lucy.” She couldn't help noticing how much easier it was to curtsy when you were wearing a dressing gown, and had no corset to poke you in the back of the legs.

Mayne dropped a very credible curtsy as well. Then he strode to the side of the room. “All right,” he said. “Now
watch me carefully. Lucy is young and unknowing, but she's been a
coquette
from birth. That means that she instinctively knows that men wish to see a woman's hips sway when she walks. Do you understand?”

“No,” Josie said. “My governess, Miss Flecknoe, taught me to walk with a book on my head.” She put on Miss Flecknoe's mincing voice. “Ladies must walk upright, without unnecessary wiggling of the torso.”

“Miss Flecknoe is an idiot,” Mayne said. “Wiggling is precisely what you do, in a refined manner, you understand.” He put a hand on his pink-clothed hip and began to walk across the room toward her. Somehow, like magic, his walk took on the sleek stroll of a female predator, a woman so confident of her appeal that her hips swayed like a ship encountering a swell of water.

He turned around and giggles burst from her mouth. Of course her poor dress came nowhere near meeting in the back. In between the gaping seams was a broad expanse of smooth skin.

“Stop chortling, witch,” he said over his shoulder. “It's your turn.”

“My turn?”

Somehow Josie found herself next to him. “Let your hips sway,” he said. “You have lovely hips; I could see them even when you turned yourself into a sausage.”

“I don't—” Josie said, but weakly. Perhaps the corset would have to go.

She walked beside him, across the room, but it didn't work. She didn't feel like a
coquette,
for all she put a hand on her hips and swayed. She was trying not to think about how wide her hips would look, going back and forth like that. And then she realized that what she'd really like would be Mayne's body in a female form, because his hips were absolutely flat and of course that was why he looked so sensual when he pretended to be a woman.

He stopped short with a little exclamation. “You're not giving this your attention, Josie!”

“I am,” she protested. “I really am. I'll try again.” And she ran back to the wall and, under his gaze, walked toward him, trying to waddle from side to side. Because that's how she felt about it: as if she were waddling. If waddling would make men slaver, or even ask her for a dance that hadn't been arranged by one of her sisters, she was eager to do it.

Mayne's eyes narrowed and she could read failure there.

“Maybe I simply…” her voice trailed away.

“You're not
feeling
it. Have you ever kissed anyone, Josie?”

“Of course I have!” And then she realized what he meant. “You mean, kiss a boy?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of kissing a man,” he answered, amused.

She shook her head. Who would want to kiss her? Was he blind? He must have read that in her face.

“There's the problem. You don't have any sense of yourself because you—you don't have any sense of yourself. Have you—” But he checked himself. Whatever that question was, it clearly couldn't be asked, even under the influence of far too much champagne and moonlight.

Then he was there, in front of her. He was wearing a pink dress with cap sleeves. The glass beads painstakingly sewn on by Madame Badeau's seamstresses glittered in the moonlight. He should have looked absurd, but instead, Josie felt as if Bacchus himself had indeed wandered into this strange little turret room and was there, with a deep wild invitation in his eyes.

Although what he was saying didn't sound inviting.

“I'm going to kiss you,” he said briskly. “Someone has to do it the first time, and it might as well be me because I'm very good at it. But Josie—” He caught her around the shoulders.

“Yes?” She knew her eyes were round.

“I'm in love with Sylvie, you know that.”

She scowled at him. “I take it you think I might fall in love with you because of a kiss.”

His smile was crooked.

“Don't worry. Since we are being frank, I shall tell you that I have no intention of falling in love with anyone who is as old as you are.” His smile disappeared. “My sisters have done nothing but throw men of your age at me since the season began, and while it was most kind of them to dance with me, I…”

Her voice trailed off. He actually looked a little hurt, but perhaps that was just her imagination, because he said easily, “You want to marry someone your own age, which is absolutely appropriate. Although I would recommend that you look for someone who has actually reached their majority.”

“I have a list,” she told him.

He grinned at that. “What's on your list?”

“I shan't tell you all of it, as it's private. But I did decide that twenty-five was quite old enough, after Imogen pointed out that Rafe fit nearly every item I had written down.”

“Someday, I would love to see that list,” he said, his eyes gleaming with amusement. “But now the night grows toward dawn and your sisters will be wondering where I've taken you.”

Josie shrugged. Her skin was prickling all over and she was acutely aware that the two of them were alone, both half-clothed. “Imogen has presumably left with Rafe on their wedding trip,” she said. “Tess has gone home with Felton, and Annabel had already left the ball when I encountered you. She has a new baby and she misses him after a mere half hour, or so she says.”

“Motherhood takes some women like that,” he said. “Like an illness.”

He took a step closer and tipped up her chin. “You have beautiful skin, Josie, did you know that?”

“It's my best feature,” she muttered, mesmerized by his eyes. They were looking at her in such a way, as if…as if…

His hand cupped the back of her neck and fingers curled into her hair. “Your hair is beautiful too.”

“Brown,” she said, trying to break the spell of his liquid voice.

“Bronzed in the sunlight,” he corrected her. “There was one afternoon on the way to Scotland when you sat in the carriage window and the sun played with your hair for hours: it was all bronzed deep tones, bewitching and soft.”

Josie knew she would never feel the same about her hair.

Then he bent closer. This is it, Josie thought. She knew what to expect, of course. She'd seen Lucius Felton brush kisses onto Tess's mouth. She'd seen the Earl of Ardmore drop kisses onto Annabel's hair, and her shoulder, and wherever the poor deluded man could drop a kiss. She'd even come around the corner of the corridor once and seen Imogen in Rafe's arms, and he was kissing her, and their bodies were touching.

But it wasn't at all what she thought.

Mayne's mouth didn't brush her adoringly, the way Felton's had Tess. Instead his mouth came down on her like a crushing weight, hard and demanding. She had no idea what was being demanded, and had to stop herself from struggling. No wonder Mayne's affairs lasted only two weeks, she thought dimly. The man doesn't know how to kiss!

He was probably as bad at the whole of bedding as he was at this.

But it would never do to make him feel bad, not when he'd been so kind as to try to—whatever it was he was trying to do. Give her her first kiss so that she could walk better, and if that wasn't a stupid notion, she'd never heard one.

The hand he had in her hair did feel rather nice, as if he was coaxing her to do something, to do what? His tongue too…he was running his tongue along her lips. A strange thing to do. Josie filed it away in her mind as yet another substantial reason why the Earl of Mayne had remained unmarried until the ancient age of thirty-five.

And then suddenly it all changed.

How or why, Josie didn't know.

All of a sudden, she could smell him. He smelled wonderful, a spicy male soapy smell. She looked up at him and his eyes were heavy, and suddenly she could feel his thumb rubbing against her neck, and it all felt very queer. As if—As if she'd just taken off her corset.

“That's my girl,” he said against her mouth. His voice was dark as the room, dark as a wine god's own purr. She opened her lips to answer him. And that was the biggest surprise of all. Because in one smooth movement he pulled her up and against his body, and at the same moment his tongue came into her mouth.

She went rigid with surprise. It wasn't clean. It wasn't hygienic. Surely it wasn't—

But she lost the thought in a haze of sensual feelings, because somehow her arms were around his neck and curled in his hair. And those breasts that she so despised were pressed against his chest and it felt exquisite, like torture and pleasure at once. And he was in her mouth, speaking to her without words, his hands holding her tight so that she couldn't move back. Except she didn't want to. All she wanted was to be crushed against his big, solid body, feeling small and sensual, and all the things she never felt.

Which was exactly what he meant her to feel.

As if the thought and the truth of it came in the same moment, a pulse of liquid flame swept over her body, weakening her knees, making her feel as if she couldn't stand without him. He was driving into her mouth, fierce, demanding
strokes, and she knew why women wept when he left them.

As if he could read her thoughts, he pulled back and stared at her. His eyes had darkened, or perhaps the room had darkened. They didn't look blue anymore but black, and for a second she thought she heard the breath rasp in his chest.